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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7395611" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes from time to time meets charaters who, up until then, have not been written about. From the point of view of the reader, they are new characters.  But no one asserts that Sherlock Holmes's meeting of them created them.The same is true of the secret door. The PCs' discovery of it didn't create it. The engineer and stone masons who constructed it created it. It has existed, in the fiction, from the moment of that creation. Although no audience or author of the fiction knew that. Just like Conan Doyle didn't know about Sherlock Holmes until he wrote about him. But Holmes himself was born, had a childhood, etc.Denying that is what is obfuscatory.RPGing has always involved a degree of flexibiilty in the timing of narration. Even back in the high-water mark period for dungeoncrawling, stuff got made up (eg "What colour is the roof of this room?" "It's brown-grey stone.") No one said that the roof had no colour unitl it was described by the GM!The secret door is the same. Descbring it, and making it up, are things that happen in the real world. In the fiction, it was always there, and it's just a misdescription to say that the PCs, by looking for it, brought it into existence - anymore than the PCs, by looking up, made the ceiling be brown-grey.I'm hoping to get you and  [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] to agree that discovering the door isn't the same as creating the door. And that there's nothing remarkable about a new element being introduced into a fiction although, at the time the audience first learns of the protagonist's encounter with it, it already existed within the fiction (eg an adult met by Holmes for the first time).This is true.One technique in "no myth"-type GMing is to keep introduced elements somewhat flexibile - or, at least, no more fully narrated than the situation needs. This then allows scope for integrating newly-established elements into already established elements of the fiction. Eg if, when the secret door is discovered by the PCs, a mysterious NPC had already been in the scene, and the method whereby that NPC entered the place hadn't yet been established - well, maybe s/he came through the secret door!Keeping track of these elements of the fiction, and interweaving them to provide continuity while keeping the focus on "the action", is part of the job of a "no myth" GM.</blockquote>

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